Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism” • Hacker News Board

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#11

Post by ddebernardy » Tue, May 31, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

This unfortunately doesn't seem realistic:

> Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our activity.

b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening.

Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea. The "right to privacy" was coined with the advent of cameras in the 1890s:

https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-o...

The main new thing today is the ubiquity of the public sphere owing to IT. Inadvertently ending up on a picture in the late 19th century was a rather trivial intrusion of privacy; the same picture posted on FB today instantly makes it available to anyone with an internet connection. Not saying privacy has little to no merit, but nothing short of a full-blown societal rethink is going to make taking and sharing those pictures stop - a piece of hardware just won't help.

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#12

Post by Aelinsaar » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:01 PM UTC

More and more people will adopt ad blocking, script controls, and of course, use a proxy, VPN, or otherwise anonymize their traffic. More and more people are (and are going to be) encrypting their traffic.

This is not a one-way street.

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#13

Post by otabdeveloper1 » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:08 PM UTC

ddebernardy wrote: post #11

This unfortunately doesn't seem realistic: > Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our activity. b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening. Also, let's not forget p…

> Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea.

Well, no. Fences existed since caveman times.

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#14

Post by FussyZeus » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

logn wrote: post #10

FussyZeus wrote: post #2

> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…

Does it matter if people ignore ads? These are not broadcast ads like radio or television. They analyze behavior and encourage an architecture that exactly suits the needs of government surveillance. And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can b…

That's true but (the way I read it anyway) the author is contending that advertisements themselves would be used to shape public opinion which, while true, I think the effects are dwindling because people are becoming more aware of that.

Additionally, I wouldn't say behavioral tracking is implicitly always nefarious. Speaking as an app developer the analytics we get from users is 100% anonymous and not used for anything more evil than just helping us design and improve software. Usage data like that is gold to us because most people don't leave/send feedback, especially the ones we really want to hear from, i.e. the ones who stopped using it.

I think we need more regulation in the web industry in terms of how we're allowed to collect data, how we must store it, and have serious penalties for those who break those laws.

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#15

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:39 PM UTC

logn wrote: post #10

FussyZeus wrote: post #2

> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…

Does it matter if people ignore ads? These are not broadcast ads like radio or television. They analyze behavior and encourage an architecture that exactly suits the needs of government surveillance. And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can b…

[deleted]

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#16

Post by harshreality » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

FussyZeus wrote: post #2

> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…

If you see ads, they have subconscious effects even if your conscious mind ignores them.

Then there's the curation problem of sites like reddit and facebook. People curating information streams, or developing algorithms to curate information, think they're doing the right thing by eliminating bad content, but by doing so they introduce bias into the information stream, and that bias might be just as pernicious.

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#17

Post by ams6110 » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:48 PM UTC

I'm not so sure things are as dire as he thinks.

Most of the people I know are growing more and more irritated by Facebook and other social media. Many have stopped using it and deleted their profiles. And these are not "tech" people but ordinary adults and teens.

I think people are quite perceptive when a service changes from being truly useful, as Facebook was in its early days, to being an intrusive pain in the ass as it is now. They may not all jump ship right away because people have different tolerances for this stuff. But from what I see, people are more aware of what's going on than Mr. Moglen is giving them credit for.

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#18

Post by ams6110 » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #16

FussyZeus wrote: post #2

> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…

If you see ads, they have subconscious effects even if your conscious mind ignores them. Then there's the curation problem of sites like reddit and facebook. People curating information streams, or developing algorithms to curate information, think they're doing the right thing by eliminating bad content, but by doing so they introduce bias into the information stream, and that bias might be just as pernicious.

If you see ads, they have subconscious effects even if your conscious mind ignores them.

Yes, so what? This has been the nature of advertising since long before the internet was involved.

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#19

Post by ashitlerferad » Tue, May 31, 2016, 3:59 PM UTC

> Guardian of the GPL

Heh

Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

#20

Post by pavel_lishin » Tue, May 31, 2016, 4:07 PM UTC

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #13

ddebernardy wrote: post #11

This unfortunately doesn't seem realistic: > Moglen proposed deploying "freedom boxes" at every street corner—cheap hardware running free software, deployed everywhere, that encrypt everything, anonymise everything, and blind the service providers to our activity. b/c the last mile is the priciest part of a telco's network. Unless the telcos are forced to do it, it has zero odds of happening. Also, let's not forget p…

> Also, let's not forget privacy as we know it is a distinctly modern idea. Well, no. Fences existed since caveman times.

Fences aren't about privacy, fences are^ about property rights and defense.

^ mostly, yes, you can find exceptions even back in pre-history.